Hundreds of millions of vehicles move on highways and roads all over the world. Hence, it is of utmost importance to find cost-effective ways in order to manage and control this huge traffic. Areas of applications requiring reliable vehicle identification include:                Identification of vehicles that made some kind of traffic violation        Toll roads (including access control to centers of major cities)        Parking access and payment        Security        
A number of systems for vehicle identification are known in the art.
U.S. Patent Application 2006/0278705 to Hedley et al. is incorporated herein by reference. The Abstract states: Identifying a vehicle in a toll system includes accessing image data for a first vehicle and obtaining license plate data from the accessed image data for the first vehicle. A set of records is accessed. Each record includes license plate data for a vehicle. The license plate data for the first vehicle is compared with the license plate data for vehicles in the set of records. Based on the results of the comparison of the license plate data, a set of vehicles is identified from the vehicles having records in the set of records. Vehicle fingerprint data is accessed for the first vehicle. The vehicle fingerprint data for the first vehicle is based on the image data for the first vehicle. Vehicle fingerprint data for a vehicle in the set of vehicles is accessed. Using a processing device, the vehicle fingerprint data for the first vehicle is compared with the vehicle fingerprint data for the vehicle in the set of vehicles. The vehicle in the set of vehicles is identified as the first vehicle based on results of the comparison of vehicle fingerprint data.
U.S. Patent Application 2006/0030985 to Lawida et al. is incorporated herein by reference. The Abstract states: Vehicle recognition may be achieved by receiving multiple metrics from one or more vehicle sensors, analyzing the metrics to create a multi-metric vehicle identification profile comprising at least two of the multiple metrics, at least one result of the analyzing, or both, and matching the multi-metric vehicle identification profile against multiple stored vehicle sensor recordings.
U.S. Patent Application 2002/0080013 to Anderson et al. is incorporated herein by reference. The Abstract states: A license plate number for any vehicle extant within a field of view of an electronic camera is interpreted as a character sequence group in an image. Each character sequence group found in the image is converted to machine readable format by an optical character recognition engine and compared with a database having a plurality of license plate numbers and associated records. Each matching license plate number and associated record is displayed within the surveillance vehicle.
U.S. Patent Application 2007/0208681 to Bucholz is incorporated herein by reference. The Abstract states: A system for collecting, storing, linking and processing license plate data to provide compilations of information and displays of such compiled information. The system has a license plate reading system that may record time and location data in addition to license plate data, license plate image data, and image data of a vehicle. The data is collected over an extended period of time and stored for later searching. The data may be correlated, indexed and/or categorized in storage. The collected data may be compared to various existing or other databases and correlated and/or indexed to such databases. That collected data may be processed, searched, and/or analyzed for a variety of purposes.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,747,687 to Alves is incorporated herein by reference. The disclosure describes a “system for recognizing the same vehicle at different times and places.”
Notwithstanding the above art, an improved system for vehicle identification would be advantageous.